To-day at 1:18 pm (CT) we all received a Presidential Alert, a wireless check, text message on our cellphones. It could have been either a thrill or terrifying depending upon our political affiliation. As an political independent, I sought more information about it and found and excellent article Trump Is Not Texting You in The Atlantic, which explains in detail about this mandated Wireless Emergency Alerts system.

The New York Times reports Credit Card Signatures Are About to Become Extinct in the U.S. by the end of April 2018. It reports that major credit card processors don’t require signatures to complete transaction if the card transaction was made chip enabled card readers. For small retailers, it would still remain as optional.

The New York Times reports that Inside Amazon Go, a Store of the Future, an 1800 sq ft mini-market, is opening on Jan 22, 2018 in Seattle, Washington. Amazon was reported to be working this type of cashier free stores in 2016. If this technology is adopted by other major retailers then this will definitely disrupt job employment scenario.

The Atlantic has a cover story What Putin Really Wants by reporter Julia Ioffe reporting that this “was a very emotional, tactical decision. People were very upset about the Panama Papers.” Very interesting read!

There is a brief note in The New York Times explaining Why Onions Make Us Cry? It turns out that when we cut onions it releases a chemical called lachrymatory factor (LF) which irritates our eyes. LF is by product of two molecules located in cells: sulfenic acid precursor floating around and a protein called alliinase in cytoplasm, which are released when onions are crossed and produce irritating LF. This chemical is used by plants as defense mechanisms from microbes & animals. An undergraduate student Josie Silvaroli, an undergraduate at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio helped explained this puzzle in a paper published in ACS Chemical Biology in July 2017.